City Decides Public Does Not Need to View Budget Prior to Tuesday’s Meeting –
City Decides Public Does Not Need to View Budget Prior to Tuesday’s Meeting – I was hoping to be able to present an early look at the budget prior to Tuesday’s meeting, but when I pulled up the agenda item, instead I got a single page explaining the schedule.
“At its meeting of May 5th, 2010 the City Council is scheduled to receive formal introduction of the City Manager’s FY2010/11 Proposed Budget. The preliminary budget document will be distributed in conjunction with the budget presentation on May 5th.”
They could not even get the date correct. The council meeting is schedule for Tuesday May 4.
Now when the public and perhaps the council complains about not having the document sooner, we will get a nice little excuse as to how this is the budget presentation and there will be three additional meetings in which the council will be able to discuss the budget.
“This will be the first in a series of City Council meetings scheduled to discuss the FY2010/11 Proposed Budget. Following the introduction of the budget as part of the May 5th regular meeting, a Budget Workshop has been scheduled for May 11th, and a public hearing on recommended modifications to City fees is scheduled for May 18th. Formal adoption of the FY2010/11 Annual Budget is tentatively scheduled for meeting of May 25th.
The May 11th Budget Workshop is intended to provide for a detailed review of the FY2010/11 Proposed Budget with a focus on the specific budget proposals recommended to balance the budget and maintain prudent operating reserves. In addition, the May 11th workshop will cover recommendations related to both the Capital Improvement Program and Redevelopment Agency budgets for FY2010/11.
The series of presentations and public hearings related to the FY2010/11 Proposed Budget is intended to provide the City Council and community with a better understanding of the budget, and provide opportunities for dialogue and discussion of budget issues and priorities.”
The fact of the matter is that there is no excuse as to why they should not release the budget at least a week in advance of the first meeting. What they are basically doing is claiming that the council has four meetings to discuss the budget, but in point of fact, until you actually sit down and scrutinize the numbers, it is difficult to come up with real analysis. So they lose a valuable meeting to a presentation when they could have been discussing and breaking it down.
This brings up a general issue I have with the Davis City Council and particularly with staff reports. If we are lucky, the city council and public gets these staff reports on Friday, sometimes Thursday if there’s a furlough day before the Tuesday meeting.
I was meeting with a member of the Woodland City Council the other week and he told me they get their agenda at least a week if not ten full days in advance. He was floored that the city of Davis gets away with getting theirs out on Friday before the meeting. They have all read the agenda and asked all of their questions well in advance and thus their meetings are a lot shorter, but more importantly when there are hundreds of documents, they actually have a chance to go over them. Why does our council allow them to get away with that?
Since we do not have an official budget to go over, I will go over a few things that I would either like to see or to criticize.
First, I would like to see us look over and see how many planners we need in the community development department. My understanding is that we have 11 planners right now in a city that is not growing and not likely to grow in the next five years. It would be interesting at the very least to see the positions justified in public. Moreover, it would be even better if we found a way to cut half of those positions to save half a million.
All indications are that the council is going to go ahead with a fire department merger, it is unclear at this time how much they will save. But the other aspect of things right now is that they are going ahead with a battalion chief model. Part of the complaint here is that they have used the elimination of positions as an offset to the $400,000 price tag of the battalion chief model. The problem with that is that they have applied those cuts to other savings already, meaning that when the model is implemented the city will have to find $400,000 to cut.
As people who follow this site know, the last round of MOUs fell well short of the amount needed to balance the budget. To make up for that short fall last year, the city borrowed $700,000 from the reserve. They are now going to pay that back and in addition, there is an additional million shortfall in the structural deficits that will be permanently cut through a re-organization where the bulk of the savings is the elimination of 16 vacant and 4 occupied staff positions.
Meanwhile the city has not touched in any meaningful way the elephants in the room, particularly retirement pensions and the unfunded retiree health liability. The short-term deficits need closing, but these funds represent the longer term danger to the entire city budget. At the very least, I would like to see a long term strategy for how these will be paid off.
A final point, once again we have a budget with absolutely no plans to submit it to the Finance and Budget Commission for their own analysis. We just went through a subcommittee report on the use of commissions for developments which finally made the Finance and Budget Commission a required commission for developments, but why is it not a required commission to review the budget? What is the city afraid that group will find?
Bottom line here is that the councilmembers should have the budget right now, it is a waste of staff time and the public’s time to have a public meeting where the council is receiving the budget for the first time. What is the rationale for not providing them with the budget in advance so that they have had the chance to look over it and ask questions?
These guys are fond of looking at how other cities do things, it would be interesting to see how early the typical council receives their staff reports in advance of a council meeting.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
DPD: “A final point, once again we have a budget with absolutely no plans to submit it to the Finance and Budget Commission for their own analysis. We just went through a subcommittee report on the use of commissions for developments which finally made the Finance and Budget Commission a required commission for developments, but why is it not a required commission to review the budget? What is the city afraid that group will find?”
Very good point. I would like to see the new City Council pass a resolution directing city staff to submit all matters to appropriate commissions in a timely manner. At the very least, a resolution should be passed to have the Finance and Budget Commission review city budgets in a meaningful fashion.
What a waste of City Council members’ time!
They either get to just sit there and listen–in which case a videotaped presentation to be watched at home makes more sense–or they get to ask questions that are less likely to be well-formed and more likely to use up more meeting time because the council just got the material.
The majority of the council consider the Finance and Budget Commission to be a minor irritant that they can ignore. Regarding the timeliness of the agenda, the Brown Act requires that it be sent a week in advance of the meeting to anyone who requests it. Send a written request to the council, include a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and if they don’t send it, file a complaint with the district attorney.
Observer, it’s a tricky thing. The agenda itself is timely. The information that matters, the staff report, the actual budget in this case, is not. They are not breaking any laws, they are only breaking the spirit of those laws.
I’m wondering how much of this is related to management deficiencies rather than a specific intent to avoid commission input and and delay public release of staff reports, council packets, etc until it is too late for the public to digest.
It seems to me the City Manager has direct responsibility for setting deadlines for city staff. If the appropriate staff work is not being finalized and released in a timely manner, then it is probably the result of inadequate executive management, overly ambitious agendas from the CC, an unwillingness by the City Manager to tell the CC that he and his team can’t perform to their expectations, and/or some combination of the above.
My general impression is that the culture of city hall is that, on most major tasks, they are routinely scrambling until the deadline and then pushing an often inadequate work product out the door.
Perhaps it is time for the incoming CC to take some decisive steps to change the culture of City Hall.
I
When looking at the City budget, Davis citizens might wonder about the expenditure of public funds relating to defending an organization whose board members were ineligible to serve according to their bylaws and an organization that does not appear to be dissolving in conformance with California law.
Public funds used in one form or another for the legal bills for DACHA may now be about $300,000 and with the distribution of shares the cost comes to $500,000. Public funds in form or another have now paid for over 20 lawyers to work on the DACHA situation.
DACHA does not appear to be following California Law on the dissolution of a cooperative. Two weeks ago the President of DACHA told me they had no funds for lawyers. Now DACHA has a lawyer. Who is paying for DACHA’s lawyer? Are the citizens of Davis one again providing public funds to pay for DACHA’s lawyer? Has the City of Davis made more public funds available to DACHA?
California Law has this to say.
(b) If an organization formed under this chapter uses public funds, it shall not use any corporate funds to avoid compliance with this chapter …
The California Law has a method for dissolution of a cooperative. DACHA appears not to be following the law.
So the question now is “are public funds of the citizens of Davis being used to defend DACHA against the allegations of breaking California law?
David Thompson, Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation